Had a day with the family, which was really great. I don’t really post any personal stuff in this blog, because that’s not really what I want it to be about. I’ve started to maintain another blog for personal stuff not related to poker. I may or may not let you know what the blog is.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about table selection lately. I think it’s important, and I think no one talks about it much. They just say that table selection is important, and it affects your bottom line, but I don’t see much in the way of specifics. I’m not going to tell you how to select your tables, but I’m going to explain how I select mine, and then you can tell me what I’m doing wrong, because I think that’s somewhere I can probably improve my game.
I go through the list of games – whether on Stars or UB. 90% of the time I’m going to play cash NLHE. If I know I will have 2.5+ hours (like a Friday night), I’ll look for a tourney with an overlay (like the .25 + $100 guaranteed on Stars). These days, my first choice has been UB for cash games though, just because that’s where I have more money.
The first thing I do if I know I’m going to play a cash game on UB is I check UltimateBuddy. UltimateBuddy is like an instant messenger list, except instead of being able to chat with someone, it shows what tables they are at. Everytime I find a terrible player, I add them to the list. So, I look to see if any really bad players are online. If they are, I double click their tables and go to them. If there’s a seat open and they are at a level I want to play at, I’ll sit down, regardless of anything else, because they bleed money. Most of the players I add to the buddy list don’t stay active for long, because they blow their money pretty quickly, so this process is hit or miss.
So, I open up the cash game section. I evaluate my bankroll for that site, and determine how much I am willing to play per table. Usually, it’s <5% of my BR. With my BR at about $170 on UB, I’m looking at about $8.50 max buyin. Then I pick a range of stakes based on that. These days, I’m basically stuck at .05/.10 on UB. I’d probably play .02/.05 for $5 if they had it, but they don’t. I’ve generally been buying in for $5 lately with my short stack strategy. My PTBB/100 has been lower (about 7) because of the short stack strategy, but I’m playing with confidence because I know I can get stacked a couple times by a bad beat or my own bad play, and not really have it dent my bankroll.
Well, UB lately has been pretty short on the full .05/.l10 tables. There are always lots of seats available at 6max. There’s probably about 20 full tables going on a regular basis, and 2 or 3 short handed tables. I don’t like playing shorthanded much, so I try to avoid them. I just think the variance is too high (going to post about this, because I may change my mind). So, right away I’m having some problems finding a seat at a table with 8 or 9 people at it for my BR. That’s why I sat at .10/25 the other night with $8 – there were plenty of tables open, and a couple had really nice percentages.
At times when I do have a decent choice, and there’s several tables available, this is what I’m looking for:
Number of players: >7
Average number of players seeing the flop: >35%
Average Pot size: < 30 BB
Most players having > $ than what I sit down with
Basically, I want a a lot of players seeing the flop with small pots and few raises. This allows me to open limp in with my more questionable hands like Axs and small suited connectors hoping to catch a good flop. I won’t usually look for a limp-reraise with my big pairs in this case, I’ll usually just play them for a solid 3.5x raise. I’d prefer a table with>40% seeing the flop, but they aren’t that common. The more people seeing the flop the better.
If the average pot size is higher than that, which is usually is, it means the table is more aggressive. I usually won’t open limp as much, but I’ll still limp if I have limpers in front of me. In addition, it also allows me to do a fair amount of limp-reraising with my bigger pocket pairs, especially if I have pokertracker numbers for the players to act after me.
I prefer that the players at the table have big stacks. It’s not a tournament, so really, I want them to have me covered. Having a bigger stack than everyone else at a cash game has no intrinsic value, because if I get stacked, I can just rebuy. When I hit my big hand, I want to be paid in full. Flopping a boat against a guy with an overpair does me no good if the other guy only has $1 in his stack.
One nice bonus for playing on UB that I don’t get on Stars is that you can prefetch hands and stats for the tables. Gametime+ will allow you to grab the previous x hands up to 200. I usually have it set to 35. Any more than that, and it just takes too long to grab all the hands when you’re 4 tabling. I like the hands to be grabbed within 3-4 minutes – basically before I get to the big blind and have to post. The hand grabbing makes it difficult to click any table buttons while it’s going. 35 hands isn’t enough to be super-confident about how someone plays, but it gives me a head start. If I tried to grab 200 per table, it would take about 15 minutes.
If the table does end up being a little tight – say after 1 or 2 bad players bust and leave, and everyone has a VPIP of under 25, I will consider getting up myself. I’ll start going through the lists again looking for good numbers.
